In today’s digital era, the importance of understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine/Deep Learning (ML/DL) in media and communications cannot be overstated. These technologies have revolutionized how media organizations operate, transforming the way content is produced, distributed, and consumed. By mastering the principles of AI and ML and gaining practical experience in training machine learning models, students will be prepared to drive innovation in their future careers. Whether it is automating repetitive tasks, optimizing content strategies, or creating personalized experiences, graduates of this Master's degree lesson will be at the forefront of the media industry, equipped with the skills to harness the power of AI and ML for a successful and impactful career in media and communications. The lesson begins with an introduction to AI and ML, providing students with a solid foundation in the underlying concepts and techniques. They will delve into the principles of automated decision-making, learning algorithms, data mining, retrieval, and analysis methodologies that form the basis of these technologies. Students will also explore the ethical considerations surrounding AI and ML, fostering critical thinking skills necessary for responsible implementation. To enhance practical skills, the lesson offers laboratory experience using powerful low-code tools, such as Rapidminer, for training machine learning models specifically designed for media-related automations. Through hands-on sessions, students will learn how to process large datasets, extract insights, and optimize model performance. They will gain proficiency in creating tailored ML solutions for various media platforms, enabling them to automate tasks and revolutionize media workflows. Furthermore, this lesson emphasizes real-world applications within the media and communications field. Students will explore cutting-edge examples and case studies, examining how AI and ML are transforming industries such as advertising, journalism, and social media. They will gain insights into how these technologies are reshaping content creation, audience targeting, personalized recommendations, and sentiment analysis. One key aspect covered in this lesson is the use of large language models for automated content creation. Students will understand how AI-powered language models, such as GPT-3, can generate high-quality text, opening doors to innovative content creation strategies. This hands-on experience will enable students to explore the potential of AI-generated content and its impact on various media formats, from news articles to social media posts.

The current module examines the role of propaganda as a means of communication and persuasion. It focuses on the definitions, content, intent and methods of propaganda throughout the twentieth and twenty first century, and analyses the specific language used for propaganda purposes. It also investigates the relation of propaganda with modern mass communication and technology. The course will be structured around the interaction of propaganda within several socio-political issues in EU. Such issues include political systems, election campaigns and fake news, warfare techniques and methods, healthcare and immunisation, planet pollution and politics. Particular attention will be paid to understanding the language of propaganda through a linguistic discourse analysis. A series of workshops aims to put theory into practice.

This course is designed to help graduate students with academic writing by developing the skills necessary to produce high quality work in term-papers and the end-of-year dissertation. The lectures, tasks and activities are richly varied, ranging from small-scale language points to studying the discourse of journalism, media, and communication. Topics to be dealt with include: writing expository and argumentative texts, writing summaries, introductions and conclusions, discussion of data, citing and attributing sources, researching and creating bibliographies. Students receive feedback on their writing and are expected to engage in self-editing and peer-reviewing. 

During the last 30 years mainly due to pressing environmental problems leading to climate change, an increased interest on behalf of the media in environment has been monitored. The wide publicity given to ecological accidents contributed to mobilizing the public and strengthening the environmental movement, making the global environmental protection a key issue. Covering the “environment beat” requires that journalists have the ability to report on complex and interwoven subjects, from land use policy to laboratory discoveries; energy technologies to natural history; waste management to wilderness travel. The emphasis of the class is on developing an informed and nuanced approach to reporting and writing environmental stories. During the semester, you’ll learn about current and emerging environmental topics, but more important you’ll gain hands-on experience in the basics of journalism: deciding what to write about, gathering news, conducting research, investigating, and interviewing. Throughout this course, working in teams or alone, we will focus on developing the skills unique to the environmental journalist. At the end of the semester we will publish our own newspaper, based on our semester work. 

The course aims to develop a comparative approach to journalistic practices, roles and values, which, based on the concept of 'journalistic cultures', prioritises questions of socio-cultural and political context. Although it draws examples from all over the world, the course focuses mainly on Europe, and more specifically, on its diverse journalistic traditions and on their implications for news reporting and media cultures in different countries and regions of Europe. 

Course Description

This course provides students with a broad understanding of the global Tourism and Hospitality sector, the latest trends in the travel industry, and the role of storytelling in destination branding and digital marketing. It also focuses on the challenges, crises, and global issues that affect tourism in the post-pandemic era and explores the impact of storytelling on awareness raising and attitude change for responsible tourism and sustainable travel behaviour.

The course offers a combination of theory, case studies, assignments, hands-on activities, and group projects aiming at exploring new forms of travel communication through digital media.

 Course Objectives

• Understand the role of digital media and storytelling in travel and tourism.
• Recognize, understand, analyze, and discuss the storytelling strategies for destination branding and digital marketing.
• Recognize the structure and narrating techniques of travel stories.
• Gain knowledge about tools and techniques for mobile writing, editing, and publishing.
• Appreciate the role of travel writing and travel User Generated Content (UGC) in communicating culture, understanding and respecting the ‘Others’, and promoting a sustainable and responsible travel lifestyle.

 Learning Outcomes

At the end of this course, students will:

• have knowledge of the latest trends and industry sectors in Tourism and Hospitality.
• be able to produce online travel stories and audiovisual travel content.
• have the knowledge and develop skills for strategic storytelling in the tourism and hospitality sector.

 Class/Learning activities

In-class presentations- workshops, discussions, case studies, literature study, assignments, final project

The course aims at providing students the essential theoretical knowledge and technical skills on multimedia projects implementation and management, using state of the art production, editing, and authoring techniques. Starting from the conception of a creative idea until the formulation of a technical project plan, basic terms and definitions along with production methodologies and development models are deployed. Emphasis is given to the specific characteristics and also to the medium that is suitable for each content type. The students work hands-on individually and in groups in the laboratory, with practical exercises that include animated material and interactive multimedia content and make it available through various technologies. These utilities may include HTML, blogs, CMS (WordPress, Wix, etc.), media processing, authoring and sharing services (YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.), social networking and (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.). 

The course examines critically the key theoretical approaches to understand and analyze the role of new and interactive media in the contemporary society.

It introduces students to the core theoretical ideas and concepts that can be applied as analytical tools for understanding, explaining and critically discussing the development, uses, practices and interactions of media technologies and cultures.

The course follows a historical perspective that places new media theory within a broader understanding of technology and its relationship to culture and social change. 

The course introduces students to certain key theoretical concepts, approaches and debates concerning the understanding and critical analysis of the role of new media in contemporary society. It combines an analytical perspective, that sheds light on some crucial aspects, functions and uses of new media, with a historical perspective, that places new media theory within a broader understanding of technology and its relationship to culture and social change. Although it is impossible to exhaust the field of new media in a single semester, the course aims to explore selected research domains in a way that prioritizes interdisciplinarity, grounded on research rather than abstract theorizing, and the value of both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

Covering crisis presents some of the biggest challenges in todays media. This course examines how the international broadcast, print and Web news media cover wars and other humanitarian crises. The course aims to introduce the students to the techniques of journalism in reporting war& crises and offer the necessary conceptual and practical tools to understand the rapid changes in the field. 

This course charts an array of transfrontier, massive scale: risks and threats, severe hazards, global challenges, fully-fledged transfrontier crises, disasters, derivative or related problems, in progress, and predictable collateral negative developments, facing humanity as a whole, at a global and at a glocal level. These negative and complex developments affect: life, public health, the health of the environment and the attendant quality of life on the planet currently and in the future. Secondly, the course examines the political initiatives and policies, in this regard, undertaken primarily by international bodies, notably, the United Nations (UN) agencies. Similarly, it brings into focus also corresponding moves at the national and the regional, continental levels but also overt or covert reactions to policy initiatives at global level. In this frame, it presents the central decisions and protocols and measures aiming to pre-empt risk. Particular emphasis is placed on themes and guidelines for action which have been adopted and brought to prominence and public attention by the Rio Summit on Sustainability, as well as the Protocols of Montreal and of Kyoto, regarding remedies for such a total environmental malaise as the phenomenon of global warming. Thirdly, the course focuses on the related problematics in the public sphere. What ideas, reports and action proposals have been submitted for public debate about the endangered global place and space? What are the common or the opposing aspects in these treatments? What do such suggestions about controversies imply? At a more thorough discourse level, the course highlights the vital notion of: global (common) public goods. Global public goods concern us all equally and concurrently, require radically different stances and changed conduct by all inhabitants of the planet. However, environmental hazards or problems are not the only source to the endangering of global public goods. Other categories of crises and rising trends of regression jeopardize the acquis politique et humanitaire. Therefore, we need to enlarge the focus of the course, so as to also include other causes of systemic entropy or underdevelopment, such as the global financial crisis, threatening the sustainability of the welfare state, and along with it also fundamental human and political rights. The course aims, moreover, to monitor how has journalism functioned over the last decades, especially since the Rio Summit, in covering such challenges in a responsible, proactive and effective way. Has journalism proved capable (or willing) to ‘educate’ and to alert citizens about such risks or related manifest crises? Concrete cases of both national and trans-national media coverage of environmental hazards, pollution themes and crises will be discussed and assessed to this effect. We examine the options for a regenerated NEW JOURNALISM. A professional ethics and stance which adopt enlightening methodologies in treating trans-frontier, global issues with a due embracing, universal perspective. We monitor the extent to which media and journalists publish risk, threat, notably, environmental issues from biased, narrow, ‘nationalist’ or ‘partisan corporate-interests’ perspective or from a ‘global public goods’ approach. Any critical examination raises inevitably, central issues such as: ‘neutral’, ‘normative’ or ‘proactive’ journalism. Should one report facts ‘neutrally’ or, report developments responsibly, but in sensitizing, alerting ways?

The course analyzes how to manage media organizations. Media manager follows seven steps when manages media organizations. The first step is the planning; that means how managers make long run and short run programs after they have scanned internal structures and value chains, culture, values and beliefs, and resources, such assets, skills, competences, knowledge and the additional external micro and macro environment. The second step is the strategy formulation; media managers make choices about the mission, vision, goals, objectives, policy and the general strategy to achieve the previous targets. If this strategy is a forward growth strategy could be one among competitive advantages strategies (cost leadership, differentiation, focus) or among corporate strategies (vertical and horizontal integration, market penetration, development, product development partnerships, globalization, mergers and acquisitions). The third step is the strategy implementation of specific programs, budgets and procedures for the department of marketing. The strategic marketing implementation refers to the content, price, placement, promotion, procedures, physical environment and people. The forth step is the accomplishment of human resource plans. Actually it is how managers organize departments, job, division of labor, span levels of control and hierarchy, recruitments’ methods and labor relations. Moreover it is how managers direct human resources, with which leadership style, motivation and incentive practices, communication methods, how they build team working, solve conflicts and insert changes but as well how manage knowledge, organizational culture and stress. The fifth step is the implementation of media productions plans; how the media select, produce and distribute contents, how they organize live events and which specific strategies they enforce related to the general strategy. The sixth step is the implementation of accounting and financial plans; how managers make budgets, analyze income statements, cash flows, equity assets and implement plans for fundraising and investment spending and use other economic information. The final step is the control and measure of the economic and social performance. Sometimes the performance measurement of media organizations is a complicate procedure as there are not only economic measurable objectives but also social non measurable aims. Therefore there are some different performance measurement mechanisms like benchmarking, mission statement, input – output method, input-action-output-outcome method, balance score technique, cost benefit analyses and corporate social responsibility techniques. Read more at: http://media.jour.auth.gr/media-management-and-marketing-communications/ 

http://media.jour.auth.gr/public-communication-campaigns-design-and-analysis/